Sunset Meditation

While the sun does his dance into the sea, 

benefit from the final moments of each day.

Find a place to watch for an evening

                                                     to enjoy the sun's play.

When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. - Lao Tzu

Visualize the color in all its depth, intensity, and discover a metaphor.

Notice how the sun wriggles to set in tangerine dreams.

Discover creatures who play and chase the sun as he rolls down the sky.

Feel grateful for each moment.

Write about it.

Find Your Wings

"Using our wings encourages us to take chances, approach the unapproachable, create possibility, advance in a new direction, see the sky despite the clouds and confirm our strength. We should all be willing to fly." 

- Betty Dorotik

Our capabilities often take time to acknowledge. They could be right next to us yet, at times, we fear the ways to raise our wings.

Imagine where you might fly. If you jump and flap, without regret, imagine the places you will soar.

Fledge today. Smile as you feel the breeze lift you higher and farther.

Practice Positive Psychology

Martin Selyman, pioneer in positive psychology, defines happiness as pleasure combined with deeper feelings of meaning and purpose. He celebrates three measurable components: pleasure, engagement, meaning. A full life requires them.

Aristotle used the word, eudaemonia to explain human flourishing. 

"For me happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential," writes, Shaun Achor author of, The Happiness Advantage. Achor believes, "The chief engine of happiness is positive emotions, since happiness is, above all else, a feeling." He pushes beyond  sharing smiley faces.

Some researchers prefer to use the term, "positive emotions," rather than happiness.

Barbara Fredricks, researcher at the University of North Carolina, lists positive emotions:
joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, imagination, awe, and love. Her, 
"broaden and build theory," promotes positive emotions to broaden the amount of possibilities we process. This makes us more thoughtful, creative, and open to new ideas, instead of using fight or flight as negative reactions.

Eager as Love

a seedling greens inside a lemon

cocooned in silence

it startles awake

When the juice of opening 

reveals opportunity

                    - Penny Wilkes

Broaden your scope of cognition and behavior.

       Move into creativity and build more intellectual, social and physical resources. 

            You will rely upon them in the future.

Feel the Flow

We live in a universe of constant flow, flux, and metamorphosis, and we ourselves are but a speck of color floating into shape for a brief moment before being washed into the perpetually re-patterned marbling of existence; that any one life, including our own, is as precious as it is improbable and transient, and all the more precious for its improbability and transience." - Maria Popova

Push beyond the problems that tend to engulf concerning the pandemic and current state of life.
     Breathe beyond frustrations that arise.

Turn into a white egret that soars among the blue.
   Let worries diminish as the breeze sends harmony and the sun brightens the day.
      Feel your anxiety diminish.

When you tame your mind's distracted movements, you can race beyond fear and banish anxiety. Within each breath appears a sense of spaciousness.

Set yourself free, aware, and open to nature's nurture. Count the colors, breathe in fragrance, pet a flower and leaf. A flow of energy enlivens and presents possibilities instead of problems.

Notice how other creatures stay active and focused on a goal.
             Feel the flow.

A Child's Eye for Words

Do you recall your childhood association with words? Did you create names for animals and plants? Did you tell stories?

Where’s your child’s eye today? Do you still have a loving relationship with words? 

Frederick Smock, a teacher of creative writing, learns daily from his students to think with a child's mind. One student astonished him with her words when she wrote from the point of view of a coconut. “I never have to go on vacation because I carry the waves inside of me,” she wrote.

Today, delight yourself with possibilities and let your words scurry around corners and under bushes. Look into the sky to capture connections. Consider all your areas of knowledge: animals, insects, gardening, travel, economics, and relationships. 

How will you communicate the awareness that makes your days and nights glitter? 

Let your words flee and flourish. Delight in metaphors to tell your stories.

Animal Stories

What do you say to a white egret about its yellow feet?













How does a pelican learn to relate in its world?

Choose an animal to use in storytelling. Have fun writing from its perspective.

Play with the development. Write a fable or poem and stay open to insights that arrive.

Tones of Life

"For you either things are black or they're white, either they're sobs or shouts - whereas, I always glide from semi-tone to semi-tone," 

- Virginia Woolff commented to composer friend, Ethel Smyth

Find the musicality around you in bird song, a rush of wings, trees dancing in the wind.

Glide from tone to tone. 

Let any beep. beep. beep of trucks moving in reverse turn into a tune. Sing.

Go flap happy and add a dance, a trot, or a shimmy.

Tune into a smile and let laughter add to your gait.

 Just wriggle.

Find Wisdom in Nature

Consider the color green for a fresh beginning to your day. Let it grow into new opportunities and for personal growth. Add yellow for sunshine's effects. Feel the breeze and notice scents.

"Compose yourself in stillness, draw your attention inward and devote your mind the Self. The wisdom you seek lies within." - Bhagavad Gita.

Find patience with all things, especially yourself. 

Settle in and let your nature express itself as you follow the colors of the day and the creatures who sport them.  

Feel gratitude as you walk on the earth.

Let your attention remain with your surroundings.

Inhale the cosmic energy (prana).

"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living, is the one you are living." - Joseph Campbell

Stay open to Nature's wisdom.

Find the Thrill

.

If sentences run along like this bamboo, where's the thrill?

Color the greenery with irises, roses, and a daisy or two.

Write like a moving camera to take in the scenery and tease each moment. 

Let the reader experience your subject as you go. Don't tell everything.

Add the spice of sound and scent along the way. 

Spark vitality and add texture when you taste the honeysuckle. Mix and match short and long sentences. This gives the reader a breather. Avoid the use of too many "to be" verbs in sentence after sentence.

Promise yourself to avoid "is" "am" "was" "were" and "ings" for a day.

Adjectives and adverbs sprout like weeds among the "beautiful" flowers. They choke the essence from nouns and verbs that drive the sentences. Why write "beautiful" when you can show the iris float above its stalk like a banner in the wind?

Listen to bird songs and see if you can duplicate the trills on the page. Show the ping of water that splashes in a fountain.

Take a walk and record like a camera. Return home and write from your discoveries.

Ways to Write On

I feel uneasy when considering a roller coaster tide. I shudder to think about the ups, downs, and sharp corners. How my stomach would lurch from riding in a tin can on wheels.

Is this how you feel when facing a challenging writing project? What if you could focus on successful areas of life and transfer those feelings to writing when frustrated?

List five techniques you use to feel confident and successful in aspects of life. What does this confidence feel like? Use all five senses to explore the ideas.

During the years of playing competitive tennis, I always felt I could outlast my opponent. My conditioning and ability o remain confident under pressure helped train my mind to stay in a zone. I also used this technique in later years with marathons. My message to myself: Never stop when tired. Just one more step, one more word. Always stop when you don't want to. Ending in a flow creates positive conditioning that ensures a return to the process.

When we access feelings of success in other aspects of life, they can transfer into a writing challenge.

How to apply the concept of transference to your writing:

In what ways do your skills enable you to develop confidence?
How do you risk and make mistakes in your area of expertise?
Choose one area of life that enables you to express joy and success.
Which skills do you use in successful areas of life that will transfer to your writing process?
Do a free write and write whatever comes to mind when answering these questions.

Exploring your success will always help you discover ways to write on.

A Quest for Inspiration

Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, Nobel prize-winners, presented many counterintuitive theories. Once while Pauli presented his ideas about a radical new hypothesis, Bohr came out of the audience to the stage and interrupted his colleague. 

Bohr said, "We all agree that your theory is crazy. What divides us is whether it has a chance to be correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough."

Consider your ideas and possibilities. Could they be crazy enough to be true?  Go on an unpredictable quest to free trapped vitality.  

Try an experiment to awaken sluggish magic.

Look into nature for nurture. Try combining creative ideas to develop music, literature, and another art form.

Find Optimism

If some days feel like elephants coming at you, hold out those arms and take in the challenges.

O   Stay Open to Opportunities in all situations.

P    Note the Possibilities that exist around every corner.

T    Take breaks to let your mind discover connections.

I     Investigate with sights, sounds, scents and tastes.

M   Keep the Momentum going. One word, then another.  Bounce those words.

I     Imagination works wonders. Play with ideas.

S    Silliness stimulates the brain.  Giggle as you move through each day.

M   Call your Muse.  Give him or her a name and write a conversation.

Create your own suggestions for each letter. Find Optimism.

Garden Sense

"Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts." 

- Sigmund Freud

Ancient Egyptians believed in flowers as divine messengers. Temples overflowed with garlands and arrays. The lotus represented rebirth. Its fragrance traveled the mind from sensual to spiritual realms.

Gardens help individuals bridge the gap between doing and being. Tending a garden involves a sense of give and take. One supports the landscape and it gives back.

Sue Stuart Smith writes that flowers change the attitude in a room with their colors and scents.Arrangements encourage the flowering of creativity and kindness. Smith says, "Flowers are known to trigger a true smile, an involuntary smile, known as a Duchene smile, which unlike a polite smile, lights up the whole face, indicating genuine pleasure."

Blossoms in a garden offer gifts to all the senses: light, air, fragrance, texture. One feels a sense of continuity.









"It is in playing and only in playing that an individual child is able to be creative and it is only in being creative that an individual finds the self." - Donald Woods Winnicott

A garden invites playfulness.  Discover the joys and discipline today.

Write your garden sense.

A Habit of Happiness

by Marianne Dubuc

When I was a young child, my grandfather wisely told me that happy people like what is happening in their lives. He explained that the prefix of happy and happening is ‘happ’, and ‘happ’ comes from the word habit. It’s simple: when you like what is happening in your life, you are happy. - Greg Bell

My father devised diversions to keep my mind and body moving. To encourage my curiosity that raced, he offered ways to learn nature's wonders as a habit. When I appeared to need distraction, he directed me to run into the garden and look under rocks. 

He told stories of aunts who loved horticulture and donated their landscape to become a park called Inniswood. https://www.inniswood.org/inniswood-garden-society/. They developed a species of lily.

"All crawling and flying creatures amaze," he'd say and showed me the weaving powers of spiders. "Notice the color changes on flying beetles."

He would follow and ask, "Where do you hear birds sing? What's going on in the fish pond?" I trotted beyond his suggestions and slithered up magnolia and oak trees. Once I fell and brushed my head against the grass. That did not deter my future elevation into higher branches. Those views provided opportunities to explore.

I designed a fort inside a eucalyptus tree. The tree had three lower trunks that created a deep nest in the middle. Discovering ways to repurpose items, I saw potential for a canon in the hollow base of a broken bird bath. Friends and I climbed into the high branches and propelled lemons and oranges to the ground to see if we could amuse a passing dog.

Frustrated with the memorization of French verbs, I scurried to sit beneath olive trees.Taking in the scents and feeling the breeze nurtured my memory's attention. The next day I made 100% on the test.

My father disliked the use of adjectives as descriptions. He encouraged me to observe nature's imagery when frustrated or joyful. "Don't use beautiful," he'd advise. "Look at the sun descend into the sea. Watch the cloud play. That reveals beauty.

Now, during the pandemic, nature nurtures in a variety of ways. I run in early mornings, chasing the sunrise. As I pet petals and branches, my gratitude resounds in every step. I listen to bird song and sing to the breeze.

My gardening moments energize afternoons. I plant seeds with my father's advice enlightening me. He showed me a lemon flower's potential, beyond my sadness that it had fallen to the earth. Soon green lemons would appear.

"Find a micro-moment of happiness. Enjoy flowers or favorite songs. Have chocolate or tea. What matters is your intention to be happy." - Haemin Sunim

Let happiness abound as a habit that shares nature's messages.

The Power of Catnip and Kryptonite.

Elizabeth Gilbert once described a relationship with someone as both "catnip and kryptonite." 

If you have owned a cat, you know catnip's lure. Superman had to avoid his proximity to kryptonite or suffer weakened power.

Do you have a place, situation, activity or person like that? How do you neutralize the obsessive effects on you? How could it empower you to make a good decision about the relationship you will have in the future?

"Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle," said the poet Rumi.

Write about an obsession with something amazing or amusing. What about it confuses or confounds?

Make a list of catnip adventures you'd like to pursue you haven't considered.

Delve into the aspects of Kryptonite that excite. Develop a character who might like to fly into the flame.

Writers need the challenges of approach and avoidance to create works of wonder.

Always add a spark of humor.

Ways to Write On

I feel uneasy when considering a roller coaster tide. I shudder to think about the ups, downs, and sharp corners. How my stomach would lurch from riding in a tin can on wheels.

Is this how you feel when facing a challenging writing project? What if you could focus on successful areas of life and transfer those feelings to writing when frustrated?

List five techniques you use to feel confident and successful in aspects of life. What does this confidence feel like? Use all five senses to explore the ideas.

During the years of playing competitive tennis, I always felt I could outlast my opponent. My conditioning and ability o remain confident under pressure helped train my mind to stay in a zone. I also used this technique in later years with marathons. My message to myself: Never stop when tired. Just one more step, one more word. Always stop when you don't want to. Ending in a flow creates positive conditioning that ensures a return to the process.

When we access feelings of success in other aspects of life, they can transfer into a writing challenge.

How to apply the concept of transference to your writing:

In what ways do your skills enable you to develop confidence? 
How do you risk and make mistakes in your area of expertise? 
Choose one area of life that enables you to express joy and success. 
Which skills do you use in successful areas of life that will transfer to your writing process? 
Do a free write and write whatever comes to mind when answering these questions.

Exploring your success will always help you discover ways to write on.